SIDE STREETS: Circus was once a staple of Fall River entertainment

FALL RIVER — While they’re still around, circuses aren’t what they used to be; not as numerous and not as likely to show up in smaller cities.

There was a hammock in time from, say, America as wilderness to the advent of television when small cities such as Fall River, and cities far smaller, hosted a wide variety of live entertainment — from boxing matches to touring vaudeville companies, from traveling preachers to Wild West shows, temperance speakers, travelers returning from distant lands who gave lectures about their experiences — anything and everything to provide entertainment to people who were bereft of electronic media and relatively isolated from the rest of the country.

Which is how (and why) the circus came to Fall River.

On Wednesday night, at Bristol Community College, local historian Robert Kitchen stood in front of a serious crowd and talked about circuses.

Sponsored by the Fall River Historical Society, the lectures are good peeks into lost (or at least sometimes ignored) Fall River, covering things like baseball in Fall River’s early days.

Kitchen showed slides of late 19th- and early 20th-century circuses in Fall River, of circus parades.

Circus parades were very big indeed, and they were free, though they were intended to encourage ticket-buying.

“So, even for poor children, it was a big day,” Kitchen says.

And the poor children are in every circus parade. The most easily identifiable as “poor children” are the boys in ragged pants and caps who are, in the pictures, running alongside the circus wagons, looking up at the elephants, always caught mid-run as though they’d determined that running the length of the parade guaranteed they’d see everything.

The circuses were in Fall River by the 1840s, Kitchen says, often in the form of menageries, traveling animal shows.

Ministers preached against these roving zoos, but cunning showmen found an end run.

“Come and see the animals mentioned in holy writ,” is how Kitchen says the owners advertised their shows.

In the early days, circuses performed nearly everywhere in Fall River, many of them being small shows traveling by horse and wagon, Kitchen says. They performed in the stable yard of Blake’s Exchange Hotel on Second Street.

Over the decades, circuses played nearly every vacant scrap of land in Fall River. But when circuses got big and began to travel by train, Fall River’s circuses played on a piece of ground off Broadway.

Kitchen says Barnum and Bailey’s circus, playing here in the early part of the last century, brought 100 railroad cars and a staff of 1,200. They put on one performance and moved on.

“They’d put up thousands of posters in store windows and on fences,” Kitchen says.

Kitchen says the circus also gave away hundreds of tickets to local government, tickets passed out by elected officials to supporters.

There was always something a little raffish about a circus. Until crowds got too big to hear them, circus clowns told jokes — many of them political, some of them distinctly off-color.

And then there were “tights,” the garment worn on the lower half of female trick riders and trapeze artists, tights which showed legs in an era when legs were not shown.

Of course, you couldn’t always be sure who you were ogling in those tights.

One show offered the trick-riding talents of Ella Zoraya.

“She could do things on horseback only a man could do — because she was a man,” Kitchen says.

The original Grizzly Adams passed through Fall River in 1860. Adams, who lived as a mountain man in the American West, was sick, at least in part because of a wound in his head that wouldn’t heal, a place where one of his pet bears had caved in a piece of his skull. Promoter P.T. Barnum offered Adams $500 if he could stay alive through the end of the tour. Adams won the bet, dying in Neponset after the season ended.

But all wasn’t sleaze in circus world.

Ringling Brothers was called “The Sunday School Circus” because the circus had its own police force, games on the lot were run fairly and pickpockets were thrown off the lot, Kitchen says.

And the circus was big business in the days before anyone with a video game system could simulate fighting in World War II.

When famous little person Tom Thumb played Fall River in 1851, he was seen by 1,500 paying customers. The population of Fall River at the time was 10,000.

“And for some of those people, it was a real scratch to come up with a quarter,” Kitchen says.

When Jumbo the elephant, a national sensation for his huge size, came to Fall River in 1882, he was seen by 25,000 people — about 25 percent of the city’s population.

It was a nice era, before all entertainment was an unreal image on a screen, when the big world came to Fall River by train and ragged boys ran the parade route.

Marc Munroe Dion’s “Side Streets” column draws on his knowledge of the area and his affection for the city where he was born. It’s about people and places and history and the voice that comes only from one corner of southeastern Massachusetts.